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Sunday, February 3, 2013

Rajesh from Karippal is a brilliant former student of the Department of English, Payyanur College. He took his masters from Calicut University and then entered teaching profession. He worked in Mali for some years and is presently in UAE. Here in this article he looks at the ideological aspects of names and naming.This is an article from his blog. Please visit: http://thurasabhinavar.blogspot.com/2012/03/whats-your-name.html

2012, മാർച്ച് 31, ശനിയാഴ്ച

What's Your Name?

"What's in a name?That
which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet."(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene ii)

Juliet attaches no importance to a name. The rose would smell
sweet even if you call it by another name. It’s not the name but the person who
is important.

A jump cut to Alex Hailey to find out how invaluable the name
is. The protagonist in The Roots is Kunda Kinte who eschews the name
given to him by his slave master. He is not ready to give up his identity. His
name is deeply rooted in his clan, his culture and his individuality. “What’s
your name”? The question is put to Kunda Kinte with the cracking of the whip
and he stubbornly refuses to be baptized as Toby. The name embodies everything.

The name is given in a language. Language and name are
inextricably interwoven. When an African name like Kunda Kinte is changed into
Toby, he loses his identity.

The days of racial segregation still hovers around the black
people. The days of apartheid are over, no one can denigrate them as niggers,
kuklux Klan can no longer terrorize them.

The little black boy, as in William Blake’s poem, realizes
that he has become black due to over exposure to the sun. The sunlight is God’s
grace. Unlike his white brother, he has received God’s love in abundance.
That’s why he has become so black!

The slave masters were transformed into colonial masters.
Language was used to subjugate the colonized. Names were attributed freely to
humiliate the indigenous people. Empires were formed mixing blood with words.

The language of the master played a pivotal role in history
because language is power. The symbiotic relationship between the two can never
be overlooked.

Literature employs language. Hence it is impossible to ignore
the way the language is used in fiction, poetry and other genres. Language is
not an innocuous tool to create aesthetics. It is a political manifestation of
the dominant powers and their hegemonic ideology.

The Red Indians have a language which they lost in the
process of colonization, the Maoris were forced to learn English and there are
umpteen examples in history where the extinction of language paved the way for
the extinction of culture. Language, it is said, is the road map of culture.

What about a society with multi-cultural and polyphonic
background? There is no one dominant language, rather languages and cultures.
Even in such a scenario, it is quite ostensible that the dominance of the
hegemonic ideology is apparent.

As Ngugi Wa Thiongo observes in his Decolonizing the Mind,
“Bullet was the means of physical subjugation, while language is the means of
spiritual subjugation”.